Join me in assisting research for COVID-19, cancer, Parkinson's Disease and more!

View our team leaderboard here!

• What is it?

"Folding@home (FAH or F@h) is a distributed computing project for simulating protein dynamics, including the process of protein folding and the movements of proteins implicated in a variety of diseases. It brings together citizen scientists who volunteer to run simulations of protein dynamics on their personal computers. Insights from this data are helping scientists to better understand biology, and providing new opportunities for developing therapeutics." 

In short, FAH is a program that utilizes your computer's CPU and GPU to simulate protein folding to help scientists research COVID-19, cancer and Parkinson's disease among a few others. The result of this is a worldwide supercomputer constantly crunching numbers for researchers/scientists. With a lot of my audience being gamers with powerful computers, this is an excellent opportunity to help out scientists worldwide and for the community to make a difference.

According to GOTSpectrum on the LTT Forums, "This network if compared with the TOP500 list of supercomputers [in the world], would fall into 2nd; Folding@home is one of the world's fastest computing systems, with a speed of approximately 98.7petaFLOPS. It would be 50% faster than the fastest x86 computer currently listed on the top500."

• How do I get it running?

My Community Manager, Alex, made an installation tutorial which I've embedded below. We are team# 266186.

The link to download the installer is: https://foldingathome.org/start-folding/

The link to set a passkey is: https://apps.foldingathome.org/getpasskey

• Are there any risks to doing this? If I leave my PC folding all night every night, will it burn up/overheat/explode?

Nope! As long as your system is able to keep itself cool enough, under the maximum safe thermal envelope, there is no inherent risk to running FAH on your system. However, if your PC hits 100C+ for hours at a time, you definitely risk harming your system's components and should consider examining your CPU/GPU's cooling.

Another way to think of how much FAH taxes your system (on full power) would be to think about how you might leave a game running overnight. FAH doesn't use any more power than a demanding game would. You just might leave FAH running for much longer.

• How much data/internet bandwidth does FAH use?

Barely any at all! A few megabytes at a time. Being in-game or in Discord for an hour will take more bandwidth than FAH does.

• Can I tell F@H to use my CPU or GPU only?

Yep! You can choose between either, both, or none. Some people even install old GPUs in their systems along with their newer ones to run FAH 24/7. You can even set how many CPU cores FAH uses at once. NOTE: using your GPU will result in hundreds of thousands of points more than your CPU can put out.

• My PC/laptop is a potato/low specs, should I or should I not run FAH?

Sure, if you want! You will definitely get less points per day than someone with a powerful system, but every little bit helps.

• How do I see the leaderboard for our team?

Go to this link to see our team leaderboard: https://stats.foldingathome.org/team/266186

• Have any more questions about FAH that aren't listed here?

Head into my Discord server and shoot Alex K#0001 a message!